


Every Stumble and Each Misfire

by vargrimar



Series: The Chambers and the Valves [12]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Autistic Sherlock Holmes, Canon Compliant, Drug Use, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, Falling In Love, Hospitalisation, Hospitals, M/M, Missing Scene, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Season/Series 03, but it's in a hospital so?, the one where sherlock's in hospital and climbs out a window like a madman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22886800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vargrimar/pseuds/vargrimar
Summary: The anticipated pain lances through his lower ribs in a garrotting corkscrew.He endures.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: The Chambers and the Valves [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1640680
Kudos: 37





	Every Stumble and Each Misfire

**Author's Note:**

> ( what’s gonna be left of the world  
> if you’re not in it? )

_You’re letting him down, Sherlock. John Watson is definitely in danger._

Consciousness bleeds in, and it is pursued by sharp, suffocating pain.

Sherlock opens his eyes once more to a pale hospital ceiling. The room is void of Janine and other visitors, although the various bouquets of flowers settled on the cabinets have kept him company. He takes an experimental breath—the taste of antiseptic drags across his tongue—and the sharpness in his chest prods somewhere horribly tender. Agony pulses through every heartbeat.

His eyes gravitate to the PCA. Just under three notches. A part of him yearns to turn it back to nine, but he stays his hand. This amount should be sufficient. At least until he can do what needs to be done. Might need a bit of a top-up afterward with all the moving he’s about to do, but for now it will be enough. He must be lucid for this. He _must_. There can be no margin for error.

Sherlock unsteeples his hands and unclips the heart rate monitor from his index finger. His first impulse is to search for his mobile, but it has been deposited into a clear plastic bag with the rest of his belongings and stowed in one of the nearby cupboards—courtesy of Mycroft’s minions, no doubt. A cursory glance about the rest of the room yields a clock on the wall opposite the door. It reads just twenty minutes after three.

Unfortunate. A bit later than he’d like. If he hurries along, there might still be time to get things underway. He needs to move.

_John Watson is definitely in danger._

Sherlock begins to peel the tape away from the bend of his elbow. After he discards the adhesive in a sticky crumple on the floor, he takes the cannula between his thumb and forefinger and pulls it out. A thin rivulet of blood swells up from the bruised entry point. He soaks it up with a corner of the white sheet as he lets the plexus of tubing drop to the tile. The pain will intensify, he knows, and soon. Things are about to get very, very difficult.

Gritting his teeth, Sherlock starts to sit up. The anticipated pain lances through his lower ribs in a garrotting corkscrew.

He endures.

Once he is sitting at the edge of the bed, he unsticks the scattered sensors by his clavicle, unwraps the blood pressure strap, and begins to inspect the damage. Thick layers of gauze have been set beneath a sheet of translucent tape over the bullet wound and subsequent incision. He gives the gauze a testing tug from the side. It is firm, stays in place, and doesn’t peel.

Well-applied, he thinks. Very good.

Putting on his shirt isn’t as much of a feat as putting on his trousers or his shoes and neither is as taxing as gathering his belongings from the cupboards, but he manages all with moderate aplomb. If he sucks harsh sips of air between his teeth or allows strained groans of discomfort to accompany his struggles, there is no one there to see.

The hospital bracelet is the last to go. Once it has been left with the blood pressure strap, the heart rate monitor, and the rest of Janine’s tabloids upon the sheets, he slips into his shoes, shrugs into his Belstaff, pockets his mobile (after a quick text to Wiggins and two of his other contacts), and makes for the window.

He supposes he could attempt to exit through the main entrance if he truly wanted, but it would only be a matter of time before he’d be recognised. Not worth the risk. Too inconvenient for nosy staff to intervene in the middle of such a time sensitive ordeal. Can’t chance an early encounter with John or Mary, either. An alternative route will have to do.

Sherlock tugs up the venetian blinds. With a pained grunt, he pops open the window and looks outside. The air flowing in is warm with the last breaths of summer; a welcome change to the harsh, sanitised scent of the hospital. Below is a bit of a drop to the pavement—two floors with the way the hospital’s built—but nothing he can’t handle. If he can hook his feet into the enclaves made by the windowsills, climbing down should be simple. It’s not as if he’s never done it before.

He glances back to the clock on the wall. Twenty ‘til four. It really is unfortunate that he was under for so long. If he’d had a choice, he would have awoken much sooner. However, he’d needed more time to recover, to reconvene, to readjust. Being shot does take its toll on the transport, but apparently so does having one’s perception unceremoniously shattered.

Perception, he thinks. Perception, perception, _perception_. Mary Watson: clever, short-sighted, romantic, secret tattoo, only child, size twelve, linguist, baker, nurse, guardian, wife. But when injected with retentive memory, knowledge of skip codes, and a convenient lack of connections prior to 2009, who does Mary Watson become?

Answer: someone who would want to kill Charles Augustus Magnussen.

Not that Sherlock would lament Magnussen’s death. The man is a true psychopath with an insatiable lust for power; to call him a reprehensible human being would be a charitable description. Considering he controls the majority of the western world through mountains of damning information on an untold number of individuals, it is no surprise that he’s got yet another enemy who wants him dead and buried. What _is_ a surprise is that that particular enemy happens to be Mary Watson.

Mary Watson. _Mary Watson_. The woman who was once John’s Girlfriend and John’s Fiancée and who is now currently John’s Wife is a liar. Her hair, her clothes, her jewellery, her posture, her accent, her past—every last detail, lies. The identity of Mary Watson, John’s Wife is a false façade created with the sole intent to deceive, and deceive it has.

How expertly crafted, he thinks. Bravo. Now the façade must crack.

With a deep breath to steel himself for the agony to come, Sherlock starts to climb out the open window. His insides scream as he tucks his legs under and hoists himself through, but he clenches his jaws and wears it as best as he’s able. The edge of the window is warm with sunlight against his skin; he pools all his focus into the sensation, narrowing, blocking out the rest of the world.

Slowly, Sherlock scales his way to the pavement with a howling ache in his chest.

When he is safely aground, he punctures his fingernails into his palm to reroute the pain and leaves the hospital premises with hindered haste. He withdraws his mobile, reads the three replies, and sends another two texts.

He needs to meet with Wiggins. He needs to make his way to Leinster Gardens. He needs two extra phones, a Bluetooth earpiece. He needs a wheelchair, a saline bag; something convincing. He needs the memory stick with his copies of the wedding photographs. He needs a projector that can clearly broadcast a large image across a distance of at least twenty metres. He needs a bottle of Claire-de-la-Lune.

The pieces are scattered and time is running short. John will return to check in before the evening’s out, and when that happens, Sherlock must be ready, must be waiting. He has no doubt he can coax John to play his part; the leverage of a bullet in his chest is ample clout. Luring Mary will be what’s difficult.

He hopes the morphine lasts that long.

He knows it won’t.

Sherlock flags a cab off the kerb and orders the driver to Leinster Gardens. If his other requests have gone through like the texts indicate, most of the items he needs will be delivered within the next two hours—meaning he won’t have to travel much whilst suffering another inconvenient bout of internal bleeding. He taps out a short reply to Wiggins, and then another to one of the other contacts in his homeless network. Thank God for small miracles.

Satisfied for the moment, he pockets his mobile again and leans his head back against the seat. The sun seems to pulse behind his eyelids, mirroring the continuous throb centred just to the right of his sternum. His palm drifts to the tender spot slotted between his ribs. The pressure hurts, slight as it is, but it’s grounding. An anchor. A reminder of his vow.

This will be another scar, he thinks. It won’t be like the lashes on his back, primal and haphazard in placement. Instead, it will be a precise and compact spot, rent with purpose, with control; a single point in a constellation with a pallid slash of knitted collagen bisecting its starburst centre. He will bear it like the scars he bears upon his back: quietly, proudly, and without complaint. Marks of hardship. Marks of war. A mark like John.

Mary Watson. _Mary Watson_. God, he should have seen it. He really should have seen it. The data was all there, wasn’t it? Tucked neatly in between the lines. Prepared for him, really. Why hadn’t he seen it? There’s always something, he _knows_ that, and yet he’d still _missed_ it. _Why?_

Sherlock must be making a pained face because the cabbie glances in the rear-view mirror with a crease in his craggy brow. “All right back there, mate?”

“Yeah, fine,” he says, “I’m fine,” because he must be; there is no other choice.

If circumstances had been different, the fact that Mary meant to kill Magnussen is something he could have overlooked. Magnussen is an appalling creature and the world would be all the better for his loss. If Mary were truthful, if Mary were the person she’d claimed to be, he would have helped. He would do anything for John, God knows he would, and by proxy, he would do anything for Mary. If Magnussen had blackmail on Mary Watson, he would do anything in his power to help—even if it meant pulling the trigger himself.

But Mary is not truthful. Mary is not the person she’d claimed to be. And the fact that Mary had been—no, _has_ been—deceiving John is something he cannot overlook.

_You’re letting him down, Sherlock. John Watson is definitely in danger._

Regrettably, a wedding guest with a questionable history still remains.

Sherlock intends to suss her out.


End file.
